Useni Eugene Perkins may be the most famous Chicago poet you've never heard of

Author of "Hey Black Child," Useni Eugene Perkins, speaks to children and parents at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Dec. 2, 2017, on the South Side. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

Author of "Hey Black Child," Useni Eugene Perkins, speaks to children and parents at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Dec. 2, 2017, on the South Side. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

Christopher BorrelliChicago Tribune

For a long time, if you stumbled across the poetry of Useni Eugene Perkins, there was a fair chance you thought you were reading the work of Maya Angelou. It’s often credited this way online. Which might be flattering to Perkins, except many more people seem to think he’s Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance poet who died in the 1940s. In fact, Perkins, who lives off Jackson Park, is 85 and looks very much alive, a testament to his years as a long-distance runner. Still, confusion over his legacy has lasted for decades.

Recently, after an African-American arts website posted video of a 3-year-old Chicago girl reciting “Hey Black Child,” Perkins’ best-known (and most misidentified) poem, with a note explaining that Perkins is the author, not Cullen, a reader left this comment: “You insult my black heritage to covet that which is not yours. Tell the truth.”

The truth is, Useni Eugene Perkins wrote “Hey Black Child.”

A longtime fixture of the South Side art scene, Perkins was a leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which sought to distance its art from European influences, encouraging fresh Afrocentric voices. He is the son of Marion Perkins, a celebrated sculptor whose work is collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, and Eve Perkins, who was a domestic worker for University of Chicago dorms and North Side families. He wrote “Hey Black Child” in 1975, for his musical “Black Fairy.” He intended the words simply, as lyrics to the play’s penultimate number. Yet in the 40 years since, “Hey Black Child,” and its long cultural tail, has gone through several unexpected twists.

For instance, if at any time since 1975, you were a child in a black classroom in Chicago, there is a good chance you recited “Hey Black Child,” for an assignment, at an assembly — in fact, if you were a black child in a black classroom anywhere in the United States since 1975, there is a chance you recited Perkins. Teachers have used its empowerment message as an affirmation for years. Some schools include it in morning announcements. Some families have the poem on posters, framed in their living rooms:

“Hey Black Child

Do you know who you are

Who you really are

Do you know you can be

What you want to be

If you try to be

What you can be ...”

Delores Mister, who teaches first grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn, said she first heard the poem recited three decades ago, as a student teacher. And she still uses it: “It’s something a child can carry through life, it’s easy to remember and it’s not necessarily something they will be hearing at home.” The poem, initially a song, and spare in its language, pairs nicely with theatrics. A couple of years ago, after that 3-year-old Chicago girl, Pe’Tehn Jackson, recited “Hey Black Child” at a Black History Month event, a video of the spirited performance went viral. Which led to a recital on “Windy City Live.” Which led to an appearance on Steve Harvey’s NBC show “Little Big Shots.” Collectively, videos of Pe’Tehn reciting Perkins were watched millions of times, and clearly influential: YouTube is now full of kids, from Memphis, Tenn., to Texas, reciting “Hey Black Child” — and more often than not, misidentifying Perkins as Cullen or Angelou.

Now Little, Brown and Co. is publishing “Hey Black Child” as a richly inventive children’s book, illustrated by Bryan Collier, a four-time honoree of the Caldecott awards, given annually to distinguished picture books. Remarkably, aside from a single 25-year-old inclusion in an independent-press collection of Perkins’ plays, it’s the first mainstream publication of “Hey Black Child.” (On Wednesday, Perkins will be signing the book at Evanston’s downtown library, with a special performance by Pe’Tehn, who is now 5.)

“I wasn’t actually familiar with (the poem),” said Collier, who lives in upstate New York and has illustrated picture books about several famous African-Americans, from Rosa Parks to musician Trombone Shorty. “When this came across my desk, I did research — and like a lot of people, I read it was by Countee Cullen, Maya Angelou. Little, Brown was like ‘No, no ... It’s this gentleman from Chicago.’ So we’re doing it because the work is powerful — a lot of people have handed this poem down, generation after generation. It’s nice to finally get a book. But it’s also nice to settle at last the identity of the author.”

To give a Chicagoan his inevitable due.

Perkins’ papers, letters and manuscripts, after all, are already collected in the Chicago Public Library archives, “because, to anyone knowledgeable of the Black Arts Movement, Useni is a key, particularly to the literary part of the movement,” said archivist Michael Flug. “He’s also an unusual artist, not a poet or playwright or author of social justice books — but rather all those things. And more — by profession, he’s a social worker, in impoverished African-American neighborhoods. It’s a big life.”

Said Pemon Rami, a Chicago filmmaker who directed the original production of “Black Fairy”: “Useni’s work has touched so many and made major contributions to Chicago, whether the city realizes it. Sad thing is, when we discuss black writers in Chicago, people don’t tend to push beyond Gwendolyn Brooks. His name doesn’t come up the way it should.”

Indeed, Perkins has written several books of poetry, and a few social justice studies about abused and troubled children. He’s written two dozen plays, about race riots, blues pioneer Lead Belly, the civil rights lunch-counter protests. Julieanna Richardson, executive director of the Chicago-based “HistoryMakers” oral history project, said that when she moved to Chicago in 1980, Perkins was such a staple of the black theater scene she knew his work before she realized he lived in Chicago. He’s been the president of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Hyde Park. Oh, and he’s editor of the 35-year-old Black Child Journal. And “Hey Black Child” is not even his only new book: Chicago’s Third World Press just released “Rise of the Phoenix,” a collection of personal narratives from the struggle for civil rights, by a wide range of Chicagoans.

Still, “Hey Black Child” remains his legacy.

And not a bad one, a work of inspiration that, according to Christopher Reed, professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University, deserves its canonization, alongside other such black empowerment classics as “What Shall I Tell My Children Who are Black?” by Margaret Burroughs, the late Chicago poet and activist who was a mentor to Perkins.

And yet, Perkins, on a weekday afternoon at home, finds himself doing what he has done often in his long career: Justifying his own authorship, proving his authenticity.

“You know, I guess I took ‘Hey Black Child’ for granted for so many years,” he said. “I’d heard it recited so many times, and by so many children, and still, for some reason.” He jumped out of his chair and grabbed a shrink-wrapped vinyl record. It was the soundtrack to “Black Fairy,” long out of print in this country (but still selling well in Europe). He pointed to the back cover: “Lyrics by Useni Eugene Perkins.” He put down the record and pulled a rolled black-and-white poster from his crammed bookshelves.

He unfurled it:

The lines to “Hey Black Child” flowed down the center, like a motivational mantra.

“My brother, Toussaint, who is deceased, he made these posters, and for years, they were everywhere. We didn’t charge for them! But look, if you notice ... my name at the bottom of the poster ... it just says ‘Poem by Useni,’ which I think created some confusion. ... But really, Countee Cullen? Kind of Victorian-style, more like classical poets, like a Keats, a Wordsworth. Maya Angelou? She wrote free verse — I don’t see the connection, either. Though to be fair, I never understood how any of this happened.”

Indeed, when Alvina Ling, editor-in-chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, came across a video of Pe’Tehn reading “Hey Black Child” and considered how the poem might make a picture book, she believed the work was in the public domain. Ling recalls that Pe’Tehn had misidentified Cullen as the author, “which we couldn’t confirm, but eventually found Useni, who was super surprised.” That said, at the American Library Association trade show in Chicago last summer, she was surprised herself by the long line to meet Perkins, “all these parents and teachers who’d known his poem for years.”

Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune

Useni Eugene Perkins, a Chicago social-worker autographs one of his books for the mother of Ionna Houser, 4, after a reading at Trinity United Church, Dec., 2, 2017.

Useni Eugene Perkins, a Chicago social-worker autographs one of his books for the mother of Ionna Houser, 4, after a reading at Trinity United Church, Dec., 2, 2017. (Abel Uribe / Chicago Tribune)

However, before Little, Brown decided to do the book, Perkins had to provide proof of authorship — primarily, a copy of a 1993 collection of his plays on small Third World Press that included “Black Fairy.” Which, in a way, is a bittersweet reminder of how even the most popular art by black artists can become neglected, or treated as niche or regional. It’s also a reminder, said Richardson, “that the black arts renaissance in Chicago has never been decently acknowledged by the country as a whole, not the way the Harlem Renaissance is recognized. That so few people could place the author of a poem, who is alive, whose work had a following — well, I think it says a lot, don’t you?”

Reasons for the confusion over “Hey Black Child” are myriad, hard to parse:

Perhaps it stems from vague attribution at the bottom of a poster. Or the lack of attribution we give poetry that becomes part of the cultural woodwork. Or the viral, iffy nature of online life. Or the historical neglect of black authors by white publishers.

Perkins himself is modest, humble.

He notes the Black Arts Movement, in contrast to the civil rights movement, was not interested in conformity or reconciliation; he said white academics have “hijacked” the history of the movement. But about the treatment of his own work — “I think I’ve accepted it.” He looks around his office, floor to ceiling with books, its walls covered in framed recognitions. He sighs and says he’s not bitter.

“Useni has given his life to this community, so little else matters,” said Haki Madhubuti, founder of Third World Press, which has published Perkins’ books since the early ’70s. “He’s not a well-off guy, yet at times he’s used his own money to keep us alive. That’s a brother who won’t betray you.”

Perkins grew up in the Ida B. Wells public housing project. His father was friends with Richard Wright and Paul Robeson, and Perkins caught the art bug early. He published his first poem in the Tribune at 11. But after serving in the Air Force, he returned to Chicago, attended George Williams College and became a social worker. For almost 20 years, he was executive director of the Better Boys Foundation, a North Lawndale social service agency. “In the early 1970s, there was an idea to build a theater for the foundation,” Perkins said. “A lot of people thought a theater couldn’t be successful in the same neighborhood as the Vice Lords and Egyptian Cobras (street gangs). But we were determined.” The La Mont Zeno Community Theater opened in 1974 with 250 seats, and Rami, its first artistic director, needed a couple of seasons of plays. Perkins submitted “Black Fairy,” which he wrote after a trip to the Goodman Theatre with his 8-year-old daughter Julia: “She said, ‘Daddy, why aren’t there any black people in children’s plays?”

“Black Fairy” told the story of a child with low self-esteem, taken on a trip through black history and folklore, revealing to him the greatness of his roots. “The problem was the play needed a bit at the end, to send audiences out on a high note,” Rami remembered. “I asked Useni to write something, and the very next morning, he had ‘Hey Black Child.’”

“Hey Black Child

Be what you can be

Learn what you must learn

Do what you can do

And tomorrow your nation

Will be what you want it to be ...”

The show played for a couple of months, to packed houses of schoolchildren, teachers, community members. It was a word-of-mouth hit, helping establish the theater (which has long since closed) and a few careers: Among the actors were Robert Townsend; Masequa Myers, now executive director of the South Side Community Art Center; and Paul Butler, who later became a regular actor in August Wilson plays. The independently produced and distributed soundtrack (which included acclaimed jazz saxophonist Chico Freeman) became a standard in many middle-class African-American households. A producer of the 1970s musical hit “Bubbling Brown Sugar” flew to Chicago, to consider bringing “Black Fairy” to Broadway (but nothing came of it).

Still, “Hey Black Child” stuck, and gravitated to posters, T-shirts and school assemblies. At Betty Shabazz Academy in Grand Crossing, “Hey Black Child” has been part of its annual kindergarten graduation ceremony for years. Said teacher Sandra Cheatham: “My favorite part is the line, ‘Learn what you must learn,’ because it speaks to what is expected of kids, it says they must apply what they have learned to their coming years.”

Perkins moved on to other plays (for local black theaters), other poems. And as he got older, the poem became a background refrain in his life. Until Pe’Tehn’s “Windy City Live” performance in 2015. That day, his phone rang off the hook with friends telling him he wasn’t credited. And he wasn’t the only one. LaShaun Jackson, Pe’Tehn’s father, said: “If you Google the poem, you get a lot of different authors, but a lot of people also know Useni! So we heard from a lot of his friends — they were incredibly upset with us!”

The upside, of course, was an unexpected book deal, and a book — using watercolors and collage, giving pages the striking appearance of giant street murals — for posterity.

The downside, said Julia Perkins, his daughter, a consultant for arts organizations (including the Art Institute of Chicago), is “that an artist tends to want you to see a body of work, and one piece might fit in to that body of work. My father, he’s 85 — whatever frustration he felt has passed. ‘Hey Black Child’ just leapfrogged the rest of his accomplishments.”

As for the elder Perkins, he sees himself a forerunner to Common and Chance, rappers whose art flows seamlessly out of social work and vice versa. Only much less known. He says he’s not naive; rather, he’s thankful for the notice, however late. Taped to the side of his desk is “I Won’t Complain,” a poem as predictable as you’d expect: The author had good days, bad days, but he won’t complain. It’s by a Houston pastor, murdered in 1990, at age 30. But there’s no author mentioned on the photocopy, and Perkins had no idea who wrote it. Could be anonymous for all I know, he said. You know how that goes.